Alice Walker on Zora Neale Hurston: October 2, 1980

Alice Walker begins by noting the discrepancies in Zora Neale Hurston's purported birth dates and the circumstances of her literary estate, before talking of Hurston's historic reception and her tendency toward "constantly flying in the face of everybody [black] who wanted to put the best foot forward." She traces Hurston's biography as a poor working-class black woman who went to Barnard College, where she'd study anthropology. Hurston, says Walker, intended to assert: "Black life was not the sum total of white oppression."

She reads at length from Mary Helen Washington's "Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow," constrasting Hurston's stance with that of Richard Wright, who accused her of minstrelsy. She tells of the regrettable controversy between Hurston and her friend Langston Hughes, that led to the end of their friendship, and speaks of the reality of Hurston's poverty throughout her life: "Having no money is a real problem."

Walker then — after telling a story recently related by a hairdresser in a black beauty shop of an encounter between a sinner and a good man, and a second story, coming via Walker's mother and father, about a son writing to ask his father for money — turns to reading from Hurston's Mules and Men (selections as included in I Love Myself When I Am Laughing....):

She names Sterling Brown as another purveyor of black stories, then reads, after a brief preamble on the limitations placed on Hurston by her patroness, a story collected by Hurston about a preacher. Walker begins: "Ellis hauls off and says...."

This is followed directly by a story relating the foundation of the Christian church and its multiple denominations.

She then reads a third story collected in Florida and written up by Hurston, beginning "Don't you know you can't git de best of no woman in de talkin' game...?" 

Alice Walker takes questions from the audience. She tells of Hurston's friendship with Langston Hughes and their play Mule Bone that led to their falling out, and of Hughes saying James Baldwin should have read Hurston, which would have changed his writing. She remarks that Hurston's fiction was enriched by her training as an anthropologist and work as ethnographer, and on some of the consequences of her late recognition.

She speaks of Hurston's partners and of meeting "the man who I think inspired Teacake," the character in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. She's asked what drew her to Hurston and her work, and tells of her having, even during her studies with Margaret Walker, "been programmed to read the men and not the women." She's asked about the depiction of black people in a contemporary television story in the works and notes the persistence of "white people who are diehard interpreters of black life."

Walker notes an early experience of solitude and how that figures into the formative world of many writers. She tells of starting to write her first novel (The Third Life of Grange Copeland) in 1966.

She talks about encountering artist Judy Chicago's "extremely clichéd" depiction of blackness and failure to imagine black women in Chicago's signature work "The Dinner Party," which moved Walker to write an essay on that work. Asked about antipathies between and black and white women in the feminist movement, Walker closes by noting: "We have to really be responsible for our own freedom. Nobody else is going to ever give you anything."